Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Napoleon and Divide-and-Conquer

Today i learned how the French emperor Napoleon is related to the computer programming algorithm technique Divide-and-Conquer.

It was December 2, 1805 on the battle of Austerlitz when Napoleon was faced with an Astro-Russein army which out-numbered his with 15,000 solider, so Napoleon drove right into the middle of the enemy's army to splite it into a tow smaller armies which each of them is weaker than his army.
The Astro-Russein two splitted armies each suffered heavy losses and were compelled to retreat.

From the previous story the technique of Divide-and-Conquer were developed that for some instance of a problem, if the instance can be divided into smaller instance of the same problem, then the solution for the original instance can be obtained from the solution of the smaller one's

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